Southwestern Homelands Read online

  In 1987 the University of Montana agreed that I should be given time off during the dark winter months. With little idea of what we were doing, except that we wanted to wake up to sunlight, write in the mornings, and play a little golf or hike in the afternoon, Annick and I found ourselves in the oldie-goldie retirement town called Green Valley, which is strung along I-15 about thirty-five miles south of Tucson, past the Titan ICBM Museum, on the way to Nogales. The golf and typing were what we’d imagined, and we had a fine time hiking among the white-barked sycamore in Madera Canyon, just to the east in the Santa Rita Mountains, but our time there was not an entire success. Soon, quite soon, we were restive and scanning the real estate-for-rent pages in the Tucson newspaper.

  What was our problem? Did we lack the imagination to connect in a community where we didn’t know anybody? Maybe, but it wasn’t just us, it was also Green Valley. It wasn’t so much the so many graying folks, most of whom, like us, were escaping winter in some northern state. Rather, it was that there wasn’t anybody else.

  There weren’t any young people, or people of any color other than white, except for the hired help, there wasn’t anybody on in-line skates in the mall, there were just retirees driving the streets in electric golf carts and sniffing cantaloupe at Safeway. But why so negative? Maybe I’ve lost my head. Or maybe, on the other hand, as Tom McGuane once wrote in another context, “it’s one of the troubles we’re having with our republic.”

  I’m talking about enclaves, oftentimes gated and guarded, of well-to-do people, in this case mostly white and elderly. Green Valley seemed to me to be an internment in which I nevertheless enjoyed the golf, a mortuary community.

  But I’m being unfair. No doubt a spectrum of opinion about the responsible conduct of life was alive in Green Valley—pacifists, birders back from padding their lifetime lists in Costa Rica, hard-headed sue-the-bastards enviros and nuke-’em-all-into-the-stone-age racist warmongers and screw-everybody-I’ve-got-mine-in-a-Swiss-bank capitalists. Maybe an occasional revolutionary (however hard to spot).

  But enclaves based on an institutionalized class distinction (money) usually turn out to be brain-dead versions of paradise, inhabited by people with nothing to discuss because they already know what they think, people who are threatened by other opinions. They’ve spent a lifetime accumulating the right to a few last insulated years. Nobody is going to take those years away. Not many such people are interested in rocking the boat. What often results is an emotionally frozen community, people interested in taking care of number one and staying as insulated as possible against perplexity.

  Annick and I lucked out. We found another casita, this time inside the grounds at the Omni Tucson National Golf Resort and Spa, on Arnold Palmer Way, in a truly gated community. The price was for unfathomable reasons affordable, and we loved it. So wherein, if anywhere, lay the difference, if there was a difference?

  Going to resorts is like crossing into another country, where it’s supposedly easy to live according to the natural pace of the body. Sleep until noon, have a massage. Obey some inner child. Visit the hummingbirds out at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum as they negotiate the swift business of their lives. Or go hiking at daybreak, into the cholla-lit-by-sunrise epiphany. The Tucson National, despite gatekeepers, worked out like that for us. The patio behind our casita looked over an undulating, manicured fairway to the wide sandy course of the Cañada del Oro, which carried floodwaters down from the Santa Catalina Mountains during the monsoons of July. While other fairways ran on the far side, coyotes roamed along the Cañada in search of rabbits and poodles to devour. At dusk, deer and javelina came out from the brushy thickets. Roadrunners and lizards, rabbits, doves, and owls were around all day. Annick wandered the animal trails like a child seeking the unpredictable. Twilight was the secret time she loved best. But it was also the dangerous time, since the Cañada del Oro is a miles-long tract of wildness inside the city. She found, despite patrols by white-shirted security from the Tucson National, recently used transient camps. So men from security kept track of her comings and goings. But Annick paid them little attention and went on traipsing.

  Off our patio there was a fine cottonwood leafing out for another spring, clamorous with an evolving population of blue grosbecks, mourning doves, and cardinals, green-tailed towhees and cactus wrens, four species of thrashers, and phainopepla, a vivid black creature which likes to feed on mistletoe (how it came to us we didn’t know). I sat on that patio, waiting for Annick to return from the Cañada del Oro, paying attention to the antics of songbirds and was content with just that.

  And we were in a city, free to explore into the energies of the southside Hispanic community, which was exotic to me (Annick grew up near northside Chicago). Off Speedway, west of the interstate in Tucson, there’s a café called Mariscos Chihuahua, which is a prime favorite with me. I love the seafood, and think of it as the happy café, where smartassed talk and laughing happens. I surreptitiously watched mommas and daddies and grandma and grandpa and young wide-eyed girls and little whispering boys and babies in arms. The light of their regard for one another lit up the walls. With little idea how those people had earned the money for their meal, or why they seemed so pleased with one another, I nevertheless fed off their energies; we were to the edges of the turista loop, seeing over into a neighborhood where we liked the look of things even if we didn’t know what was involved in living there or of the sadnesses that touched those people. We were only with them, after all, when they were at dinner together and thus celebrating.

  The next spring I taught at Arizona State University and we lived way out on the Beeline Highway, east beyond Phoenix in Fountain Hills, which was famous for the towering fountain of water which shot off at undetermined times over the man-made lake in the desert—an advertising gimmick. At the university, people looked at me curiously. Fountain Hills, I gathered, was not a cool move.

  Annick fractured her ankle jumping off a boulder, but we wrote and I finally read Rilke, and we hiked the eventually flowering Sonoran Desert in undeveloped ravines, where, lately, a terrific golf course has been built. What to say? At twilight we gazed east over the spectacle of Red Mountain and on to the Superstitions and distant unsettled highlands where morning once or twice revealed light snow. People on our street, which was named after golfer Lee Trevino, were into double-income families, both parents in business suits as they commenced a commute. Their kids joined other kids walking to school. They were obviously trying to lead well-lighted, upscale lives. Where in hell was the problem?

  Phoenix and Tucson and Albuquerque, with their stunning expenditures of nonrenewable energies, are like cities everywhere, complex in their particular ways but insulated like spaceships. In the Southwest, cities are not so much stuck in the past as intently dreaming up designer versions of an air-conditioned paradise centered on wealth, ease, and privilege. It’s easy to fault them.

  Privilege no doubt breeds selfishness, and tends to suppress generosity. Privileged enclaves are indeed one of the troubles we’re having with our republic. But class distinctions are double-edged and cut various ways. It’s important, if we’re interested in fairness, to remember that people in those cities are confronting mortality, cherishing their progeny and friends, dancing and laughing and praying while often feeling as utterly lost as we do. Or, contrarily, as at home.

  Nevertheless, a deeply anti-democratic culture seems to be forming in the Southwest. If money and power live isolated, chances of dissolving class distinctions are few. The problem, I guess, is within us, the old competitive animal, as we strive to solace and to better ourselves.

  Annick and I encountered a Gila monster crossing the perfectly mown grass of an upscale fairway, the ancient creature scuttling toward cover in the bush. How had it, the stranger, so otherwise and alive, yet dangerous, poisonous, managed to survive? Mainly, I guess, by staying furtive.

  In the 1960s, when he was living outside Cuba, New Mexico, Bill Eastlake befriended Ed Abbey (a pair
to draw to, of naturals if ever there was one). They talked themselves in a grudge against billboards along the highway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and began traveling the road after midnight with chain saws in the back of a pickup. “Falling signs,” Eastlake said. “It was foolproof. You could see headlights for twenty miles.” Foolproof was something those boys liked.

  So what’s that possibly apocryphal story add up to beyond name-dropping? Maybe it’s just about admiring the ways of a countrified world too much to give up without a fight.

  John Graves, from the Texas plains north of the Brazos, wrote in The Last Running of a cowman who grew old as settlement came to the short-grass prairies. That man had seen the end of the bison culture and the ruination of the terrible Comanche, left helpless after their herd of fourteen hundred horses was shot by the U.S. Cavalry in Palo Duro Canyon, under the Cap Rock. Broken-hearted by the losses connected to preparing for death, Grave’s story is not a whit softheaded. The old man says, “We had a world once.” After that vote in favor of evolved ways, he shuts up. He lets it go at that.

  It’s common knowledge that life and work are often successfully conducted by free individuals operating in a communal fashion, each subsumed in collective projects. But collective traditions and thinking that are understood to be inviolable, if the community is to survive, can be smothering.

  In Dakota, Kathleen Norris writes about towns on the short-grass plains which have withered into emotional paralysis. Unwilling to evolve, they’re in fact offended by the possibility. Change, Norris writes, “means failure.”

  Emotionally gridlocked communities are everywhere in the Southwest, not just in retirement settlements. In long-established backland towns, where extended families have lived for generations, we see signs of prideful care—tight fences and neat gardens above the creek, a couple of good saddle horses and milk cows on lush meadows. But beyond occasional American flags flying above immaculately white-painted houses, there’s no sign they want much to do with anything beyond the confines of their particular watershed.

  In southern New Mexico, just south of Truth or Consequences, Highway 152 leaves Interstate 25 and winds to the west through the Mimbres Mountains toward the old open-pit mining town of Silver City. It’s a sweetheart drive; Emory Pass is the sort of two-lane blacktop where advertising agencies like to film sports cars negotiating turns at high speeds, asphalt twisting up through evergreen forests, and then the falling away to grasslands along the Mimbres River.

  Silver City, at about six thousand feet in elevation, unlike ranch communities in the mountain territory reaching off north, seems to be opening out to the world. At dinner, writer Sharman Apt Russell and her husband, Peter Russell—who works for the Nature Conservancy—explained that fresh halibut was a bright new luxury item in Silver City.

  A long-time mining town, Silver City’s economy is dominated by the Phelps Dodge Mining Company, and the three giant copper mines they operate. But the price of copper is less than half of what it was six years ago, and the company is closing one of its mines, dropping 650 jobs. That’s big, bad news in Silver City.

  But more important news, from a region-wide perspective, is recent wrangling over reclamation bonding for the mines. In 1993 New Mexico passed a mining law that demanded mines be reclaimed “to a condition that allows for the reestablishment of a self-sustaining ecosystem…appropriate for the life zone of the surrounding areas.” Such work is very expensive. Cleaning up the Butte, Montana, district could cast 1.6 billion dollars. New Mexico asked Phelps Dodge to post a 759-million-dollar financial assurance bond for reclamation of its Chino mine, and it’s expected that a similar bond will be required for its six-thousand-acre Tyrone mine. New Mexico was shocked. The Phelps Dodge counteroffer is 99 million dollars. Behind-closed-doors talks are proceeding. While no one in New Mexico wants to force the closure of those mines, the public recognizes they’ll be picking up the tab if mining companies don’t. And the costs are more than financial; they involve human health and an ecosystem semi-permanently degraded by polluted groundwater.

  An intense emotional and economic battle, traditional industries like mining and ranching and logging balanced against environmentalists, has of course been going on in the West for decades. Silver City happens to be the site for the latest episode.

  It’s a battle involving people who feel their traditional ways of making a living are being taken away from them by outsiders. Feelings run deep, and are sometimes quite irrationally furious. Locals feel attacked, and think of going to war. Should the so-called New Story of the so-called New West emphasize human homelands and traditional ways of making a living, or ecological restoration? Implications are both psychic and practical. Stay tuned.

  It’s commonplace for outsiders to express disregard for people who live in the backlands. The real issue in negotiations with rural enclaves is often respect. A version of that story is being acted out in the hill country north and west of Silver City—reaches of grassland at nine thousand feet in elevation, aspen and cottonwoods along mountain creeks. Much of that sparsely inhabited territory is public land, owned by you and me, managed by the United States Forest Service. A lot of it has beyond question been overgrazed for decades, often to the detriment of threatened or endangered species. But local ranchers tend to regard it as theirs, by right of custom, to use as they have always used it.

  Lately there’s been a duel over restoration of those lands, particularly wetlands, between the ranchers and people who claim the ranchers have grazed their cattle irresponsibly. There’s serious hostility.

  After my evening in Silver City, I stopped at Uncle Bill’s Bar in Reserve, about a hundred miles north, which has been called “the statehouse of redneck anger.” A hardhanded old fellow at the bar studied me when I came in.

  “There’s the boy I’m going to have unload my hay,” he said, laughing, talking loud and about me. I was out the door.

  But despite anger, the ranchers, predictably, lost their battle with the environmentalists. The Forest Service has reduced grazing allotments.

  The ranchers have responded by saying they are being driven out of business. And probably some of them are. “In one year we’ll be out of here,” says Glen McCarty, whose family has ranched northwest of Reserve since 1884. They’re being asked to live at a subsistence level. And nobody wants to live at a subsistence level.

  And, as with many country people, not just in the hills of New Mexico, there’s a feeling that promises are being broken. This is America, which said, “give me your poor, your homeless.” After enclosures in Scotland and starvations in Ireland, peasants crossed the Atlantic to the American South, and their descendants came to eastern Texas and Arkansas, and some of their descendants came to the beautiful isolated hills of western New Mexico, where they would never be crowded or dispossessed. Now, after four or five generations, look what’s happening again.

  It’s increasingly common knowledge that killing off species, unto extinction, is international insanity. What about rural communities? Aren’t they, like urban neighborhoods, part of the glue that holds American identity intact? Driving them to poverty and belief in their own inconsequence, down a road toward essential extinction—on the short-grass prairies along the 100th meridian, or in the Mississippi Delta, or in New Mexico hills—is a manifestation of national irresponsibility.

  The average per capita subsidy to agriculture in the European union is ten times that of the United States. And the majority of American subsidies go to corporate agriculture. If it seems important that we maintain responsible, educated social coherency in rural America, if we want a nation that is genuinely inhabited in all its parts, not just metroplexes hooked together by freeways and airlines, we might find ways to give social, economic, and ecological support to small ranchers in the hills of New Mexico. We could institute a system in which the nation pays farmers and ranchers for ecological restoration, good money for closely monitored performance, nothing given away. There are lots of problems to
that notion. But we could work them through.

  If our national leaders are interested in preserving ranchland communities, they might study some ideas being tried in the western bootheel of New Mexico. The 321,000-acre Gray Ranch was sold to the Nature Conservancy, for a rumored 18 million dollars, in 1990, and placed under easements which prevented it from being subdivided. In response, a group of local ranchers, fearful the Gray Ranch would become an open-to-the-public national monument (which they saw as an erosion of independent rural life), and that they would be forced to sell, and that ranchland would then be subdivided, formed what they called the Malpai Borderlands Group. Their purpose was to restore and maintain “the natural processes that create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape to support a diverse, flourishing community of human, plant and animal life in our Borderlands Region.” Their primary strategy involved finding common grounds shared by ranchers, environmentalists, and government agencies.

  Drummond Hadley, a poet, onetime pal of Gary Snyder’s, and an heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune, had fallen in love with cowboying and the desert country, and was ranching nearby. Hadley and his family formed the Animas Foundation, which bought the Gray Ranch, intending to “preserve, heal, restore and sustain wildlands and waters, their inhabitants and cultures.” They began by restricting grazing, and with fires, both natural and set, burning off the weed species infesting severely overgrazed local ecosystems. Rested and burned, the old grasslands began coming back.

  Hadley then thought of the “grassbank.” If local ranchers were short of feed they could move cattle onto the Gray Ranch, where there was now plenty of grass. The value of that feed would be computed, and the ranchers would pay their bill by putting an equally valued portion of land into an easement which prohibited future subdivision. The Malpai Borderlands Group would raise money from donors and pay back the “bank” at the Animas Foundation. It’s a system that could work. The elements that are involved include a willingness on the part of participants to undergo frustrating transactions, trust, and a source of funding. That source, if the grassbank notion is ever going to come into widespread use, will most likely be local and federal governments, i.e., us, the taxpayers.